We have to what? Talk?

One day, one of those teachers said that we, as future teachers, must learn to speak, and that grammar doesn’t matter when teaching another language. Personally I think that both, speaking and grammar, are important. And people who say things like that should not be called teachers.

Well, now I should say that the most difficult skill that students have to learn, is to speak. There are many different causes. It doesn’t matter what the cause is, teachers should pay as much attention to this point of the learning process as they do to with the grammar thing.

Another memory (from high school) I have is a good teacher of mine, who really taught me grammar, and made me speak in English. This teacher, whose last name is Tzintzun, used to ask us to record a tale as if it were an audio book for the end-of-semester project. He used to form groups and assigned us a tale. All the students must participate at least during two effective minutes. This way all students got involved into the work and helped each other by the time they had fun recording the tale.

Now that technology is more accessible for more people, there are much more options to take advantage of.

I would use VoiceThread http://voicethread.com/ with my IMCED classmates (the majority of them do not speak English). Using VoiceThread I am able to help them talk in English and teach them English grammar. The advantage of using this tool is that it allows users to have conversations around media such as images, videos, documents or presentations.

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Moc, Voicethread would help make the speaking more accessible to the teachers who don’t speak English. What has always amazed me about the school is that teachers who are learning how to teach English, don’t know English. It is a paradox to me…Ellen